You can’t “take care of it with responsibility” if you have a lot of dependencies since you don’t control the library’s maintenance, or how it evolves with other libraries. So then you have to chose between adding dependency (with very real maintenance downsides) vs writing things yourself and reinventing things that should be solved.

Further, being stuck in a box also means that the community can rely on that very box and add more extensions with the architecture of the box in mind. A box gives assumptions to build on top of. Sure if you really really need a triangle it’s painful, but then you should ask, do I really need a triangle?

I think the real insight of DHH is that most web apps are not as “unique” as developers would like to believe and that the harmony that comes with conventions, the speed that comes with a unified end to end integrated system, and the focus developers gain for actual impactful choices when many unimportant choices are made for them is an amazing improvement.

He said recently, that insight is as controversial today as when he launched rails, and he is surprised more rails competitors haven’t emerged.

I think the first end to end GraphQL > Single Page App framework that has a similar level of integration to rails will dominate.